This the first entry of a number from central Europe, from a trip we took almost on impulse and for which I am thoroughly grateful. Here, though, is how it began.
After a number of delays, the most frustrating of which was the drag
through London Heathrow, Rhonda and I touched down at the first destination of
our trip. Relieved to be off a plane for
the next ten days, we found ourselves at the Liszt Ferenc International Airport
in Budapest.
The plane had
taken us over huge, scudding clouds—sure sign of the storms that were beginning
to brew over the Atlantic and would hit Ireland and the U.K. pretty hard over
our visit to the continent. Yet above
the cloud cover the sky was wintry blue—a color so bright and pale that it
seems you would find it on ceramics rather than in the sky. And that was only the beginning of the
strangeness. All around us the incomprehensible consonant-twisting of Hungarian
that made me realize how much we would be at the linguistic mercy of our
hosts.
My second languages, you see, are dead and
buried—Latin and Old English—and yet they avail in so many circumstances. I speak very little Spanish, but can
understand more of it, as I can Italian and French. Thanks to the Teutonic roots of the Old
English, I can read enough German to go the right way on a one-way street and
recognize which bathroom is for the men. But I had no handle--absolutely none--on Hungarian, so I began by thinking that we would start
in the most estranged and "foreign" of the cities we planned to
visit—or, better said, in the city where we would be most estranged and
foreign.
Budapest was the last choice I made on the cities we
would visit—a choice made largely on convenience and expense. On both counts it had seemed better than,
say, Berlin or Warsaw, but I was beginning to have my doubts as our cab raced
through industrial stretches of Late Soviet architecture on the way to the city
center. I expected guards in
ushankas, spotlights, defecting
gymnasts. But of course, it was nothing
like that where we were headed, as I found in daylight.
Budapest, certainly at its center, has been largely
restored over the last seventy years.
The Germans and Russians trashed it in the last winter of World War II,
and you are hard pressed to find a building that remained undamaged. That includes the castle, the Parliament, and
the famous Fishermen's Bastion. After
the war, the landmark buildings were restored, with limited funds but to the
old designs, using archival materials to guide the reconstruction.
The result is a mixture of beauties, a Parliament
building that is breathtaking and a Fishermen's Bastion which, although
pleasing to the eye, struck me as somewhere between a gothic structure and a
Disney castle. And yet even that cobbled
arrangement had something urgent in its design, as though if you didn't raise
it quickly and right, something would be lost forever.
It was T.S. Eliot who said, "These fragments have
I shored against my ruin". It was
the people of Budapest who shored their own fragments by a careful
attentiveness to what had gone before, to what they remembered. It had to have been foreign to them—their homes
flattened, the Soviets all over them and settling in to stay for fifty years—but
what they managed to do along the Danube, guided by memory and archive, was to
reconstruct an old identity out of guesswork and hope. You can see the seams between buildings, the
difference in a ground floor that remained intact and the facsimile upper
stories: nothing quite connects like it did in, say, the 1920s, but things have
been connected in honorable and lovely ways.
After all, the architects of old gothic cathedrals
shored fragments by considering no work complete. Each building was a slow accumulation of what
had gone before, a trust in the imperatives of both tradition and change. On a foggy day, like our first full day in
Budapest, you could stand on the ramparts of Buda and look across the river at
the government buildings of Pest, glimpsing them as you can in my attached photo, as they seemed to take shape
in a fog that hovered between settling and breaking.
